Harley-Davidson recall of 29,000 of the company’s much-hyped 2014 Project Rushmore models equates to about 11% of the total number of motorcycles Harley-Davidson expects to ship in 2013. Will it have a strong impact on consumers demand?

No, said President, Chairman and CEO Keith Wandell during yesterday Tuesday’s third-quarter earnings report. He believes that the company acted with integrity by deciding the voluntary recall, that the fix on the defective clutch will be done in a timely manner by dealers on bikes brought back by owners, and that the delay in shipment of the new 2014 motorcycles will not be more than one week.

Due to the recall Harley-Davidson will take a one-time $4.9 million charge in its fourth-quarter financial results. The largest Harley-Davidson recall was in 2011 when the company recalled 250,000 motorcycles because of a defective rear brake light switch.

Of course, K. Wandell could not say that Harley will suffer from this big recall, both in terms of sales and image. Cyril also mentioned in a former post that some Rushmore touring bikes are leaking their coolant around the engine heads. Faulty clamp?

Rodent and “others”. Do you know Mr. Wandell? You must be close friends to have so much personal knowledge about him and his riding habits. OH, you don’t know him…someone must have told you about him…no one told you?…then how do you know? Oh, you really don’t know…I should have deduced that based on your daily posts about everything else. Do you understand that your posts are normally, in the least “uninformed” and always ignorant? Your negativity really get old after awhile.

To portray a voluntary faulty product recall as an “integrity issue” is nonsense.The H-D legal eagle squawked and all the little indians ran around to avoid a few million dollar lawsuits from injured riders and crumpled bikes.I’d love to know the real details of this clutch failure and why it didn’t crop up and get solved during long term road testing.

I worked at the factory that made the clutch lines and all kinds of people got canned including myself. I heard it was an engineering issue with the clutch line. You wouldn’t believe the stuff they tried to put out. Definitely changed the way I look at those 30000$ bikes. I caught a lot of bad stuff but not enough apparently

Having had discussions with former pre-release contract HD test riders from Yucca, I believe HD could do better at proactively incorporating feedback from their test riders back into their designs — even when costs and schedules are impacted. In addition, if HD is like many businesses, I would go so far as to question whether their internal process for incorporating feedback might have room to be made more efficient and effective. While they are at it, how about providing an online mechanism for feedback from their customer base?

I understand that as a business, HD not only has responsibilities to their customers, but also to their employees and shareholders and I have not lost sight of that. Being both a customer and a shareholder, I am pleased that the recall was made when it was, not 6 mos from now. However, I can’t help but wonder if this issue was not already raised by the test riders in Yucca.

@Richard regular readers of this blog found out the minute Mr. Wandell was hired that he had no riding background. If that makes people haters or whatevers for considering how the company is run, so be it. I suppose it makes sense to some, but I’d hate to see an airline headed up by someone who prefers trains.

~ IMO, if you have a brokerage account.. raid it for 15K, build-a-bike online (a 1200 SportsterXLcp), print-out your bike and take it to a Harley dealer. Order the bike on a Wednesday and have it delivered by the next Wednesday.
No way would I EVER buy a motorcycle that I couldn’t {potato-head} assemble on-line.
I invested 15,450 in a 5-year full-warranty “magic carpet”…. and doll-face when the going gets too tough around here guess what? ….. bu’ bye now and I’m in the wind.

A terrific investment in “warrantied fun” it is, my brokerage account has already fully+ recovered from the raid and yours will too. Buy a new bike before you get too old. If the stock market crashes, you still have your Harley, right? And if your brokerage account fully recovers in 4-months, did you just buy yourself a free-Harley? 🙂 Think about that when you’ve separated yourself from the goobering miserable masses – and your out there riding bug-toothed free like the dog you are. ~

Wandell wasn’t hired by the MoCo because of his outstanding riding abilities. He was hired simply because of his proven track record of company profitability. He’s made huge changes to the MoCo since joining…most of which have been not only needed but appreciated. He did learn to ride upon joining H-D and even rode a bike onto the stage at the first dealer meeting he attended. I won’t mention the fact that he may have tipped it over, but at least he tried. Thankfully, his business skills seem to be much better than his riding skills.